DysonSphere

I've never been a fan of people who make straight-up carbon copies of ships someone else has already made; when I see Star Wars ships on the front page of Space Engineers, I remark at the lack of imagination (and I made a workshop page in the game basically advocating against this). However, taking inspiration for ships, which is what a lot of other people do, is a great idea because you can take something cool from one or two ships and then take off with your imagination. There is an awesome collage of ships someone made, again for Space Engineers, which I've looked through before, not only for inspiration but just because all of the screenshots are awesome. I know some people here will enjoy looking through them. Credit where credit is due, I had nothing to do with their creation. You won't be disappointed!
 
Ship Concepts Art Vault
Land Vehicles and Constructions Art Vault
- both created by users named Maxyall and LeonserGT (the collages of course, the art is from many, many different people, credited at the end)
 
There is also a procedural ship generator I came across before, where you can put in any string of characters as a seed and it will generate a ship for those characters:
http://ship.shapewright.com/

Well, asteroids would have to hold materials not commonly abundant on planets or rarer minerals.
 
You could technically, if the Devs enable it, to have a mining laser on a ship, that takes minerals into a container, that is linked to a refinery and having the whole system be automated. How uch that would cost you fuel-wise, is another question. Of course, as previously mentioned, the Devs have said that any automation in DU will be slower (instead of 100 mining cycles an hour you only do 10 when automating for example, numbers may vary), so AFK-mining won't be as profitable as manual mining - similar to jumping a ship manually to 0 in EVE and tee autopiloting jumping you 30km off of a gate.
 
And I do not think solar arrays can really power an entire factory ship that melts minerals and refines them into materials If I was to guess, I'd say fuel could be hydrogen isotopes based for a stable output reactor, or some other form of more "bang for your buck" fuel for different kind of reactors, that serve different needs. A factory ship for example, would benefit from having hydrogen isotopes as its fuel, as it doesn't really have to push itself in mining, it's not gonna dogfight or slug it out with the asteroids after all, while a capital ship would need a more "drastic" fuel source for outmatching another capital ship in combat, either by regenerating shields faster or anything else. A refinery ship would just need to keep the smeleters going around the clock, while players run it internally.
 
Newbros coming into the game? Give them a mining craft with a mining laser, let them mine for a pay with you in your mining ops. Don't forget to have marine corpies acting as security though, because mutinys are a thing in a game like DU, something that EVE lacked. I can already see the Miners' Union protesting for Iron prices being at an alll time low already.

Yeah, I know what you mean by contracts and all that, it's how I made my share before I trained my industry skills up (or started abusing people who started bubble schemes in Jita's market).
 
Also, as you design the ship, remember to adjust the Excel spreadsheets for fuel costs for any mining ops, because fuel is a thing in DU
 
What i really hope to see are (when the CvC part comes) for ships to have mining lasers that players can operate so they can mine in larger quantities and players to take the role of "mining drones" from EVE,, so a mining OP is more of a crew's job, rather than five guys on a tuesday night. I mean, you gotta see miners as a seperate class, instead of a job.

I think the wrong game play aspect was taken on board here sorry guys, and while I never did mining AFK in EVE it was more the aspect of organisiation buying members ores at good contracted rates and organising group mining activities that I was trying to highlight not one person trying to run 6 six accounts AFK on 3 monitors as this is not EVE and I'm thankful for that lol
 
The idea a organisation refining ship is appealing, the idea that a corp could effectivly set up a mining comunity in which players could come and go whilst all the time keep the gears turning for the corp...... time to get the pencil out an dstart some reinfery ship designs

Well, thing is you have to not be AFK to mine in DU. It's a tedious and hard work to be a miner when you have to be active to do it.
 
Kinda throws a wrench on the multiboxing miner's gears.
 
But on the plus side, you could build a ship with a refinery on it, so, yeah, mining ops can still happen, just not in a multiboxing way.
 
The second M in MMO stands for Multiplayer after all, not Multibox (like in EVE).

Thanks Yamamushi, really happy to be here. Have never gotten into a game from the ground up before so this is a great change. I'm watching those videos now and I will be happy to join you in discord for some chat once I'm done
 
Cheers

Welcome to the forum!

The answer to your question is, nobody knows. It's not clear whether there will be farming, and if there is what it will be used for. We also have no idea if having soil will cause grass to grow automatically, whether we have to plant grass seeds on it, or if other fauna can grow on soil that we place. 
 
Feel free to join us in Discord (there's a link in my signature), as there's plenty of people there that will be happy to answer any questions you might have, although there is still a -ton- we don't know about.
 
 
There's also these interviews I'd recommend checking out as a good place to start too: